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Ethan drove us around to the back where the bright lights and eager crowds out front weren’t allowed. The employee parking lot was off-limits to customers, but the most off-limits part was what lay at the bottom of a set of stone steps so old that they’d been herebefore the building over it was built. The vampires said that the stairs were here when the city of St. Louis was outfitting people for the California gold rush and the Oregon Trail. The steps had always led down to the cave system that ran under more of the city than most people realized. Hell, most didn’t even know the caves were there, but I knew. First because I almost died in them and second because now I lived in them half the time. I’d tried living in them full time, but I needed sunlight. All of us who weren’t vampires needed more sunlight, so we rotated between the underground and houses/apartments elsewhere. Jean-Claude owned safe houses that were just for his nonvampire employees to rack out at, so they didn’t grow depressed and ill from lack of natural light.
The three of us stood in the little storage room staring through the open door at the stairs that fell away in front of us until they were lost to sight—and that was before the bend in the stairs; literally they were so long that when you stared from the top they vanished from sight. The outer door that led from the parking lot into here was to our left, and behind us was a door that led to the midway of the carnival with smaller, more intimate shows that didn’t work in the huge Circus tent just off the main entrance. There was a full-size Ferris wheel and other rides, plus food booths and games like a traveling carnival that had settled down permanently. Out there it was so loud that it was hard to have a conversation unless you wanted to yell loud enough for strangers to hear, but in here it was utterly quiet. The soundproofing had originally been put in place by Nikolaos, the last Master of the City, so that the happy families buying cotton candy wouldn’t hear the victims screaming for help.
“The first time I saw the back of the Circus I thought I’d never get out of here alive, and now I’m the boss.”
“Queen,” Ethan said.
I glanced back at him, then turned back to stare down the stairs. “Yeah, queen, or about to be.” Sometimes I wondered how things had ended up this way. The me that had been threatened and nearlykilled before I even got to the stairs had believed sincerely just like my dad. Vampires were inhuman monsters, trapped outside of God’s love and mercy. The me standing here now knew beyond doubt that not only were vampires not all monsters without Grace, but that human beings could be lost souls beyond any redemption. The only difference from the Church’s perspective was that vampires were dead, so they couldn’t repent, but the bloodiest serial killer could still be saved if they were truly repentant. I’d met serial killers both undead and alive, and they weren’t savable. What they had done to their victims put them outside of God’s Grace or the salvation of Jesus Christ. I believed that sincerely now. I was suddenly peaceful. I wasn’t the same girl who came here ten years ago, because I’d seen too much, endured too much, killed too many people, to be the same person. It’s not just years that age you, it’s events.
A figure rounded the bend in the stairs all that way down, and before my eyes told me who, the energy we shared danced over my skin as if he’d brushed his fingertips over parts of my body that were hidden under my clothes. I shivered as I watched him lift off the steps and start floating toward me. It made me laugh and say, “Now there’s a solution to all these damned steps.”
He rose toward the ceiling, his long black hair spilling out around him like a dark aura. His hair wasn’t streaming out around him because he was flying toward me but moving in the wind of his own power, so that his black curls writhed and boiled like a dozen hands were playing with it, but it was his magic, just his magic.
He needed one of his usual lace, leather, and sexy-boots outfits for all that hair to frame, but he was dressed in one of only two modern suits I’d ever seen him in; the first time it had been to save the feelings of a grieving family, and this time we were trying not to give my father any other reason to hate him. In that moment I knew I didn’t care if my dad liked him or not. I loved Jean-Claude and nothing my dad did would change that.
He landed lightly on first one foot, then the other, until he stoodbeside me at the top of the stairs. I wrapped my arms around him, but the traditionally long suit jacket felt wrong on him. He either did no jacket or some version of a bolero so that it hit him somewhere between his lower ribs and just below his natural waist. He had a fabulous ass, and it seemed a shame to cover it up.
He wrapped his arms around me and laughed. “Ma petite, we chose this suit precisely so it would cover more of my body, so I did not shock your family.”
I stared up into that beautiful face with the darkest blue eyes I’d ever seen, set in thick black lashes with a perfect curve of eyebrows that were all natural; he didn’t even need mascara. So unfair to the rest of us. His face was almost feminine in its beauty, but there was something about the line of his chin that turned all that gorgeousness a little more masculine. He was still androgynous, but it leaned a little more to the male side. The long black curls framed his face and trailed down his shoulders almost to his waist. My family thought long hair was only for girls. Putting him in a traditional men’s suit really didn’t make him look more like the type of man my family would approve of, but hey, at least we were trying.
“I won’t ever look into your face without thinking how beautiful you are, and why are you marrying me?”
“I believe that is the man’s line,ma petite.”
I grinned and said, “Traditionally it is, but most men don’t look like you.”
“That you compare yourself to me and think yourself the lesser beauty means you do not see truth when you look into the mirror,ma petite.”
“I second that,” Nicky said.
I glanced at him and couldn’t help but smile at the look on his face. “I know I don’t always see the truth in the mirror. Nicky and Ethan have met who messed me up.” I turned back to Jean-Claude. “That delight is still ahead of you.”
“I am looking forward to it,ma petite, and before you complain Iwould give much if my mother and sister were alive for me to introduce you to them. That I can meet your family, however broken, is a gift to me.”
“Please tell me you’re not saying that I should be grateful for them regardless?”
“Don’t answer until you think about it, Jean-Claude,” Nicky said. “I know you heard or felt some of it. You’re too connected to Anita metaphysically to have missed it all.”
Jean-Claude went quiet in my arms as if he was starting to pull away, but I shook him a little. “Don’t do the whole statue thing where your body doesn’t feel human anymore. You know I hate that.”
“I do not want you to read what I am thinking,ma petite, because it might make you angry with me, and we need a united front at dinner.”
I hugged him tighter, feeling the suit jacket and hating it because it didn’t feel like him; even the high-collared mandarin shirt that was a royal blue to match the blue in my own outfit wasn’t enough to set it apart and make it his style. “You’re right, but promise me this is the last meeting with my family where you dress like this. It feels like I’m hugging you in someone else’s clothes.”
He smiled. “Very well, I will dress as I please except for tonight’s dinner.”
“Good, now let’s get this disaster over with,” I said.
“Of course, but first a kiss,ma petite.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?” he asked.
“That I didn’t kiss you already; nothing should make me forget that, not even my family.”
He gave me that smile that wasn’t for the stage, or publicity, or all the hundreds of photos where he was always smiling perfectly, posing. This smile wasn’t for the camera, it was for me. It was a smile that said he loved me, trusted me, and it wasn’t perfect, but to me it was the most perfect of all.
